I apologize to all of you Jeff Shaara fans out there but I tried. I really did. I was excited to read this entire trilogy but I had to stop. I couldn't get past page 200.

The problem with this book isn't the topic, or historical inaccuracies (I can forgive an author for that given the depth and scope of this project), it was simply the way Shaara writes.

He completely misunderstands the proper usage of a comma and is unable to properly deliver speech.

Let me give you an example of each chosen completely at random from the book.

Page 188: "Rommel pointed toward the door, the order for Westphal to leave,the young man exiting, the door pulled tightly shut."

I may not be the best writer in the world, but that is what my literature teachers would call a run on. The entire book is filled with sentences of this exact same structure and I simply couldn't stand it.

The other problem I had dealt with the way Shaara executed the dialogue between characters. Here is an example of dialogue taken completely at random.

Page 148: "'Hutchinson said, "Shut up! Anybody hurt?'"

This really isn't that big of deal. It is fine for an author to tell the reader who is doing the talking before the dialogue ever comes. Unfortunately, Shaara uses this device to such an extent that I found that in some sections this novel reads more like a screenplay.

I don't know why I was bothered by the sentence structure so much, but in a book that runs over 500 pages I decided to give up and save myself from the agony.

I am sure that for the majority of readers these points will be of little issue. Jeff Shaara deserves a lot of credit for embarking on a writing project like this and I hope that the books are entertaining to anyone who can get past these minute writing issues. Unfortunately for me, I just couldn't do it.